work. life. open source. diatribes.

The race involves cycling to various checkpoints and completing obstacle courses! It’s very fun because when you’re done, you get to drink a bunch of beer provided by the New Belgium Brewing company (famous for their Fat Tire beer). What’s awesome about this race is that it’s pretty much a real world version of the famous Traveling Salesman Problem covered in most Computer Science programs. The problem can be summed up as given a list of cities and their distances away from each other, find the optimal path to visit each city exactly once.

So what did I end up doing with my Computer Science background? I entered the various Urban Assault checkpoints into a online TSP solver:

Now I have a good idea of what the best route would be given the constraints!

Who says Computer Science doesn’t have its uses in fitness related activities 😉